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My name is Ross McPherson and I live about an hour's drive outside Toowoomba in Australia. I believe I have talent as a writer and I am on the way to finding out if I do or not. Some day I intend writing verse dramas on Australian themes, adapting the methods of Euripides and Aeschylus etc. I am also working on some novels. The picture is of me by the whopping great steam engine, The Flying Scotsman, during a visit to Great Britain. Some critics might say my poetry is antiquated. I say that a train has many carriages and we don't always ride up front. Besides, I'm carrying a can of spray paint. I'm remodelling everything to suit my own tastes.

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Blind Justice

You call me murderer just coz I killed
That farmer, but it’s innocent I pleads.
He called my cannabis a pile of weeds.
Don’t weeds grow best in a neglected field?
Well ‘e was just a nuisance so I drilled
‘im full of ‘oles like I was plantin’ seeds
And still ‘e gripped me throat like one that needs
Must fight his fill. So I say ‘e’s been filled.

And it’s not like I am the only one.
The judge there drives ‘is flash car when ‘e’s stoned.
It aint black powder in the copper’s gun.
Is it illegal only when it’s growned?

But us men of the world know ‘ow to deal:
Manslaughter 2, suspended on appeal?

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Usually a sonnet is the amber in which poets study the lovely butterfly of intellectualised feeling. Here I have used it to trap a dirty cockroach. The speaker is the remnant of a human being, an apt spokesman for a corrupt and dehumanised lifestyle – but still a man in spite of that.